Feisty Opera Impresario Regrets Lost Opportunity

MADRID — “I have changed,” Gerard Mortier said immediately in an interview last week at Teatro Real, the opera company here. Until recently, he was its artistic director.

Mr. Mortier, 70, has indeed changed since a meeting nearly six years ago at the offices of the Paris National Opera when he was its director. In September, he announced he was receiving treatments for cancer. He now looks very thin.

He may be the most fiercely avant-garde impresario in opera. But by bringing up right away, in a cheerful voice, how different he looked, he was being typically gracious.

Mr. Mortier’s latest venture is Charles Wuorinen’s opera “Brokeback Mountain,” adapted from the short story by Annie Proulx, who also wrote the libretto. Mr. Mortier was the driving force behind that ambitious project, which opened Tuesday, the latest in a sizable list of new operas he has brought to various companies and festivals he directed. He commissioned “Brokeback Mountain” in 2008 for New York City Opera when he was poised to become its director, until he abruptly resigned later that year before his tenure had officially begun. So he brought “Brokeback” with him to Teatro Real.

Though he participated in two news conferences last week, he declined one-on-one interviews, with the exception of this one, he said. The demise of City Opera in September after a 70-year run was clearly on his mind.

“For me, the end of City Opera is a disaster,” he said. “I must say I am suffering enormously. I think New York, such a big town, needs two companies.” It needs an “official company,” as he described the Metropolitan Opera, but also a “company for new repertory, new directors, new singers, works the Met cannot try out, like ‘Brokeback Mountain.’ ”

Mr. Mortier understands that some people fault him for the way he handled City Opera after his appointment was announced in 2007. He persuaded the company to stage no productions during 2008-9, when its Lincoln Center home, now the David H. Koch Theater, was being renovated. This was a risky course: The orchestra and chorus still had to be paid; subscribers lost confidence; audiences drifted away. Mr. Mortier argued that missing a season would actually allow City Opera to reopen under his new leadership with a reinvigorated identity.

Things did not turn out that way. When the board, having promised a $60 million budget for the first season, offered only $36 million, Mr. Mortier resigned, stating that he could not carry out his vision with a budget less than the smallest company in France.

He reiterated in this interview that his City Opera planning had been well underway. “You must know that with six months to go, everything was ready, two seasons of programs were ready,” he said. He claimed credit for the plans to renovate the theater, adding that he thinks the acoustics now are “very much better.”

He spoke of another initiative that was almost finalized. “We were negotiating a contract with offices uptown in the neighborhood of the Cloisters,” he said. There were going to be rehearsal rooms, offices, set workshops, all costing just $1 million a year, he asserted.

Mr. Mortier repeated a point he had made in 2011: It was a miscalculation on both sides, his and the board’s, to assume that fund-raising would spike once he arrived, since he was little known to New York arts patrons and had spent his career running state-subsidized European institutions. It seems inexplicable that the board of a major New York opera company and one of the most experienced arts administrators in Europe did not understand how the finances worked in their different domains.

Mr. Mortier placed most of the blame on City Opera’s board, with the exception of Susan L. Baker, its chairwoman at the time, whom he said he respects enormously. She “defended my plan” to the very end, he said. Ms. Baker stepped down in 2010.

He had wanted City Opera to think big and present challenging repertory. He was planning a production of Messiaen’s “Saint François d’Assise,” a mystical contemporary opera lasting nearly five hours, in a special staging at the Park Avenue Armory.

As the company’s finances grew shakier, board members urged him to scale down his ideas. One woman suggested replacing “Saint François” with “Hansel and Gretel.”

“I told her, ‘Well, in both operas there are angels,’ ” Mr. Mortier said. “But you have to know what you want.” He knew.

Looking back, he acknowledged one serious error: It was wrong to keep City Opera waiting a season while he completed his contract in Paris. “I should have canceled in Paris,” he said. “I really believe if I had had the chance, even with making a deficit in the first season, it would have worked. I’m still convinced.”

Without doubt, Mr. Mortier has been a major force in opera. If at times he pushed too hard, he made a difference, especially at the Salzburg Festival, where, following decades of encrusted tradition, he turned the place into a hotbed for new music, new operas and daring staging concepts.

“Yes, I’m fighting as always,” he said. “I must say this is the most conservative house I have worked with. The town is quite modern and liberal and open. But the opera audience is nouveau riche and educated on Zeffirelli.” He insisted on keeping commitments to the two composers he had commissioned for City Opera: Philip Glass, whose “The Perfect American” had its premiere here in 2011; and Mr. Wuorinen.

At his core, Mr. Mortier is an intellectual provocateur, which may explain why he has never been loath to say impolitic things that rile the very people he is trying to win over.

He did so again during this interview with his comments about the Teatro Real audience. This fall, after revealing his illness, he released a short list of candidates to succeed him, arguing that the position should not go to a Spaniard. The implication was that only an outsider could continue the shake-up. The miffed board immediately ousted him, though amends were made, and he was designated the company’s artistic adviser.

His prognosis is uncertain, he said. “It is a very bad cancer, but I recognized it very early, by chance,” he explained. (A routine blood test.) “I will do now a new treatment in Moscow. I do everything I can. The only thing that is important for me now is that I can be busy intellectually. I can talk with you. I fight for the New York City Opera.” He means it, though his idea is to advocate for a new company in New York to pick up the mantle.

Mr. Mortier is still fighting. That has not changed.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Feisty Opera Impresario Regrets Lost Opportunity. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe